INTRODUCTIONUnderstanding climate variability requires the development, maintenance
and evaluation of a sustained global climate observing system. The purpose
of the Observing System Monitoring Center (OSMC), which is being funded
by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's (NOAA) Office
of Climate Observation (OCO), is to provide a tool that will assist
managers and scientists with monitoring the performance of the global in-situ
ocean observing system, identifying problems in real-time, and evaluating
the adequacy of the observations in support of ocean/climate state estimation,
forecasting and research.
BACKGROUNDThe Observing System Monitoring Center (OSMC) system was initially developed
as an information gathering, decision support, and display system for the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's (NOAA) Office
of Climate Observations (OCO) located in Silver Spring, MD. It is an
essential component of a sustained Ocean Observing System for Climate, that
permits many discrete components to be visualized and managed as a system.
The OSMC system displays current and historical status of globally distributed
meteorological and oceanographic data collection systems. The OSMC system
provides data visualization tools to identify the coverage of any given
collection of platforms and parameters. These visualization tools are available
via the internet and can be used to present information from OSMC to other
NOAA centers, national partners, and international partners.

OSMC COMPONENTS
The OSMC is primarily built of two components -- a data base of metadata
and tools to assist with the interpretation of that metadata.

A DATABASE OF METADATAAt its core, the OSMC is database of metadata, which is focused on
both real time and historical observations. The primary source of the
real time metadata is the Global Telecommunications System (GTS). On a
daily basis, metadata (and some data) is pulled from the GTS and ingested
into an Oracle database. This database is then used to drive the different
OSMC tools to assist in monitoring the global ocean observing system.

As part of the metadata discovery process, much of our metadata is mined
from our partners at JCOMMOPS.
We continue to work with them to improve our metadata and platform identification.

OSMC TOOLS
The tools for interpretation of the metadata include those that give the
user a visual overview of the global ocean observing system, and those
that drill down and discover metadata associated with specific observations.
These tools provide both observing system managers and scientists insight
as to where the global ocean observing system is meeting expectations
as well identifying regions which may be excellent candidates for observing
system expansion.